The present invention relates to electronic medical records and, in particular, to an electronic medical record system providing improved integration of portable medical records.
Electronic medical records offer a number of advantages over conventional paper-based recordkeeping. First, the cost of generating, storing, and accessing electronic medical records is potentially much lower than for comparable paper- or document-based record systems. Electronic medical records are more resistant to loss or damage and, with the increased availability of computer devices with display and networking capability, the speed and convenience of accessing electronic medical records is far superior to their paper counterparts. Electronic medical records facilitate the collection of all relevant information for a particular patient in a single system, giving healthcare providers a more complete view of the patient's health. Because electronic medical records are machine-readable, they may be analyzed with programs to assess the efficacy of particular courses of treatment, to provide automatic notices or devise theories, and to otherwise automate the process of delivering high-quality health care services.
Electronic medical records also promise to improve the patient's access to his or her own records and thus beneficially increase patient involvement in the healthcare process. Healthcare providers having electronic medical record systems may provide Web portals to their patients allowing protected access by the patient to selected healthcare information. One such system is the MyChart™ healthcare portal commercially available from Epic Systems Corporation of Verona, Wis. Such healthcare portal systems should be distinguished from healthcare websites which allow the patient to record healthcare information but do not provide patient access to clinical medical records collected by healthcare professionals.
A third benefit to electronic medical records is that they are easily transported, for example on optical or digital media or over the Internet, and in this way can provide continuity in a patient's medical history as the patient moves among institutions. Toward this end, a number of organizations both within and outside of the healthcare industry (such as Google and Microsoft) have taken steps toward creating health data repositories that might serve to hold electronic medical records in the standard formats under the control of a patient. These data repositories foresee the possibility that patients will become the custodians of their own medical records in alignment with U.S. law giving patients ownership of their medical record data.